[sldev] 3rd party viewer policy post on blogs.secondlife.com

[Rob Nelson]

I posted on the blog and was ignored, so I'm going to repeat myself
here.

I've been developing viewers for several years, having started once the
OpenSource program was first opened to the public.  Through the process
of developing viewers, playing with the sourcecode, etc, I have learned
many things about viewer-side security.

The most important myth to disspell is that requiring viewers to
register in a central area is going to improve security at all.  Even if
viewers were registered to a central database, all someone else would
have to do is steal the registration code from a legitimate viewer and
spoof any hashes that are sent.  It's been done, and it is extremely
trivial.  

In addition, other viewers created by casual developers who are just
poking around in the code are probably not going to register, especially
if said developer is new to the whole development deal.  And what about
projects like my viewer, which are unfinished but may need to connect to
the grid every so often to test features as they are completed/broken?

And member-in-good-standing is rather vague, when you consider that the
terms of service authorizes LL to ban users for whatever reason they see
fit.  I got logged off the other day while idling in my home sim, with
no one around, and received no email as to why I got nailed.  Fix your
policies before you try adding more of them.

Too long, didn't read?  *This isn't going to work.*

Want advice?  Beef up the G-Team so they have more members to deal with
viewer issues rather than have <10 guys dealing with 36000+
simulators-worth of ARs. 

There's my two cents.  Spend wisely.

On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 10:25 -0700, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I'd like to make sure you all see the announcement of the upcoming 3rd
> party viewer policy:
> https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/community/blog/2009/10/20/third-party-viewer-policy
> 
> Followups need to be directed to the forum:
> https://blogs.secondlife.com/thread/3731
> 
> ....since many people involved in crafting the new policy are not on
> this mailing list, but will be monitoring that forum.
> 
> Thanks
> Rob
> 
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